The folks from Project Naga, who have been creating a text translation of this game for some time, and DDSTranslation, the guy that created the patches for Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei as well as Romancing SaGa, released a beta patch for their translation of Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy Wars. There have been other English patches for Holy Wars available for years but they were unfinished and didn't translate everything. However, thanks to this team's efforts, the game can finally be played from beginning to end entirely in English, graphics and all.

I began playing Genealogy of the Holy Wars at the beginning of the year and luckily my save file works fine with the new translation, which so far seems to be a big improvement over past attempts to translate this game. The patch is still in "beta" so the team is releasing regular updates that fix various bugs people are finding, so some might want to wait until the final patch is released before jumping in. Even so, it is pretty awesome that this classic entry in the Fire Emblem series has finally gotten a full English translation.

There has been a "functional" English patch around for over a decade, but having played through the game with it before... there was certainly room for improvement, to put it nicely. A similar fan re-translation of FE 6 came out a year or two ago doing a similar thing, so I'm glad there are still fans out there willing to improve the overly-literal stuff that existed before.

Oh my god, I played this game for the first time over 10 YEARS ago with a mostly finished fan translation! I never finished it but played a good chunk and this one (FE4) reigned supreme as probably the best Fire Emblem game until FE: Awakening gave it a run for its money. That said, I haven't played Awakening (due to the lack of a 3DS), but FE4 is a very unique, grander entry in the scale. There are ideas that came out of that game that didn't resurface again in the series and at least as far as I know the series hasn't quite recaptured its sense of scale.

Fantastic game and also probably easier to break into than any of the 16bit entries in the series.

@arbitrarywater: I was trying to be nice in my post but yes there was a lot of room for improvement in the old patches for Holy Wars.

It seems that Awakening and Fates have expanded the Fire Emblem fanbase to the point where there are now a lot of new fans that are going back and creating proper translations for the older entries in the series, which is really exciting to see. The team that made this translation has also said they hope to work on Thracia 776 after this patch is complete, which is good news since the translation available for that game is pretty infamous for being rather poor.

A new Thracia 776 patch would be fantastic. The current one for that game once again falls under the very generous purview of "functional". I wish Nintendo would officially localize and release some of the older FE games in the west, but there probably aren't enough anime waifus in those games to make them worth the trouble.

If we want to get really obscure, I'm still waiting for a decent fan translation of Tear Ring Saga, the game the creator of Fire Emblem made after he left Nintendo which is basically just Fire Emblem but crazier.

@arbitrarywater: There is a complete translation patch for Tear Ring Saga, you can get the latest version of it over at Rom Hacking Dot Net. I played a good chunk of the game using the patch and it is pretty good from what I've seen.

@lentfilms: Maybe they finished that patch in the time since I used it, but I remember complaints of it just turning into machine-translated garbage after a certain point in the story.

@arbitrarywater: It very well might, I only got about 7 hours into the game so maybe the translation gets worse later on. However it has gotten several updates since it was first released in 2012, the most recent patch I think came out fairly recently but I'm not sure what was updated (the change log stops at version 0.8 and it is currently at 0.86).

I just played this game not a month or two ago. The patch I used was more or less complete and up to date with the current official localized names, however there were a few one-off conversations that I noticed only had placeholders and not to mention the ending was not translated. Other than that though it was totally passable. I do appreciate the effort here, though. FE4 is a fantastic game and it's an absolute shame that it has never come over from Japan. It would be really cool to see work done on the Thracia patch as that one is just a total mess and I would like to play it at some point. Thanks for the heads up on that release, it looks quite good.